Memoir

One heady day in the mid I920s, sculptor and Lindsayite recruit Guy Lynch (brother of the elegaic subject of Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’), held forth in a pub at Circular Quay on his plan for Sydney to become an Hellenic city. The Quay itself he saw as a magnificent ampitheatre for the incarnation of the Lindsay group’s Nietzschean dream of Dionysian joy, as revealed in the vital art affirmed as the salvation from the twin vices of bourgeois philistinism and modernistic decadence, the canon that ran from Shakespeare, Rubens and Beethoven, to Norman Lindsay and Hugh McCrae. He-men would lean against pillars, girls would stroll about, and grand opera would be played amongst forests of statues.

In the Australian administrative tradition, Dr H.C. Coombs is a remarkable survivor, a maximalist and an innovator, not least in his· preparedness to write in public. The key figure in the Post-War Reconstruction brains trust which flourished under Curtin, Chifley and Dedman in the 1940s, he became Governor of the Commonwealth and then the Reserve Bank for twenty years and then entered a new creative phase in the post-Menzies and the Whitlam years.

This is the story of one woman’s crusade to achieve social justice for a handicapped child. It is one person’s elevation of the ineptitude, the hypocrisy and the dishonesty that became associated with a particular group of handicapped children. It concerns an institution that attempted to tum a pretext into reality rather than declare that a terrible mistake had occurred. Rosemary Crossley found Annie in St Nicholas Hospital in 1976. The hospital was originally a children’s hospital built in the 1890s. In 1964 The Mental Health Authority took possession of the buildings and after demolishing some and refurbishing others opened again in order to cater for the needs of severely and profoundly handicapped children, those whose purported I.Q.s were believed to be below thirty. Although it was originally designed to cater for individuals on a temporary basis most of those who came never left. It is perhaps Indicative of our attitudes towards the handicapped that the ‘high brick walls topped with barbed wire and broken glass’ were left untouched. One wonders whether the author of the slogan ‘Break Down the Barriers’ had this in mind when he took up his pen.

Douglas Stewart has pointed out that James Joyce and Henry Lawson, opposites in art, and living at opposite ends of the earth, once wrote the same story and, each in his own way, made a masterpiece of it. The funeral of Dignam in Ulysses is the same story as Lawson’s ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’. In ‘Dublin and the Bush’ (The Flesh and the Spirit) he persuasively developed this argument.

The publisher did scant service to the author by putting a ‘blurb’ before the book, emphasising ideas that are neither implicit nor explicit in it. Betty Roland does not claim to be a prophet.

The old cliché ‘I couldn’t put it down’ was literally true when I read her Caviar for Breakfast, the account of her year in the Soviet Union in 1934.

We all do silly things when we are young!

Don Whitington became a journalist seven years before I was born, and moved to Canberra for the first time shortly before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He died last year, after a tragically bungled series of surgical operations, before he was able to complete his autobiography, Strive to be Fair.

The title is taken from a remark one of the many editors for whom he worked made: ‘There is no such thing as a good objective journalist. If you are not sensitive enough to feel for your subject, to have a point of view, to suffer joy or agony or sympathy about a story you are covering, you will never be a good journalist. Don’t strive to be objective. Strive to be fair.’